Tag Archives: racial hoax

So, the report of a racial threat at very tiny and very liberal St.Olaf College in Minnesota was a hoax. On April 29 Samantha Wells, a black student at the college, reported discovering a note on the windshield of her car with the message, “I am so glad that you are leaving soon. One less n‑‑‑‑‑ that this school must deal with. You have spoken up too much. You will change nothing. Shut up, or I will shut you up.” Wells contacted police but declined to make an official report.

A student confessed to writing the note, St. Olaf President David R. Anderson wrote in a message to students. For some reason, he declined to use the word “hoax” for the false report. The threat — an anonymous, typewritten note — was “fabricated,” he said, as an apparent “strategy to draw attention to concerns about the campus climate We’ve confirmed that this was not a genuine threat. We’re confident that there is no ongoing threat from this incident to individuals or the community as a whole,” he said.

In a second campus-wide email sent later Wednesday, Anderson used stronger words to explain what happened, while still steering around the word “hoax.”

Anderson, citing federal student privacy laws, did not identify the person of interest. Nor did he discuss the tumult caused to the campus or to the damage of race relations by using a fake racial incident to extract concessions from the college.

For instance, one demand called for removing alumnus Arne Christenson from the advisory board of university’s Institute for Freedom and Community because of his “political views and values as a Christian Zionist.” Another demanded “visible and easily accessible gender neutral housing on all residence halls.” Anderson negotiated with the black students and set parameters for formal discussions. Anti-white posters appeared on campus during the crisis.

President Anderson has yet to address students on the wisdom and morality of fake hate crimes as a way of getting what you want.

John Leo is the editor of Minding The Campus, dedicated to chronicling developments within higher education in an effort to restore balance and intellectual pluralism to our American universities. His popular column, "On Society," ran in U.S.News & World Report for 17 years, and was syndicated to 140 newspapers through the Universal Press Syndicate.

The shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later mentality that has gripped our college campuses, currently basking — or wallowing — in a so-called diversity and inclusion phase, has visited Babson College, where members of the administration and faculty worked themselves into a lather over an incident of racial harassment that, it turns out, the most elementary investigation would have demonstrated never occurred.

This puts Babson, President Kerry Healey, and a number of administrators and faculty members in the uncomfortable position of having failed to adhere to an academic obligation — first determine the facts, then draw conclusions, and only then open your mouth.

The embarrassing imbroglio stems from an ill-fated and impulsive truck ride by two Babson students, Parker Rand-Ricciardi and Edward Tomasso, to Wellesley College on Nov. 9 to gloat over Donald Trump’s victory. Gloating is, of course, fully protected by the most elementary precepts of academic freedom, to which virtually all liberal arts colleges — including Babson and Wellesley — are committed.

Quickly, the word spread via social media that the pair had engaged in racist and homophobic slurs, including a targeted visit to Wellesley’s Harambee House, home to the college’s African-American cultural center. The reports of racial slurs were complemented by one report of spitting by the Babson duo.

But investigators were unable to substantiate any of these reports of hate speech. That they took root, then spread like wildfire, to the point of provoking condemnations from many of the supposed adults running Babson, tells us how far our colleges have fallen in the contest by administrators and professors to be seen as holier-than-thou when it comes to hot-button issues of race, gender, sexual orientation and other such categories.

Healey was joined by Dean of Students Lawrence Ward, and some 200 members of Babson’s faculty — none of whom apparently had bothered to look for evidence before condemning Rand-Ricciardi and Tomasso and effectively labeling them racists and homophobes. It was a classic example of the justice meted out by the infamous character Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland,” who pronounced sentences — “off with their heads” — before the inconvenience of a trial.

The unseemly faculty and administration rage was tempered only when Babson and Wellesley campus police reported they could find no evidence to support any of the allegations of racism. Babson’s campus ban on the two students was immediately lifted. Yelling “Trump 2016” and “Make America Great Again” out of the windows of a vehicle is not a crime in the USA, nor a recognized offense — at least not yet — on a liberal arts campus.

Perhaps the biggest surprise was the politically correct, premature and unsubstantiated condemnations that came from the mouth of Babson’s president, who, because of her business and political rather than academic background, might have been expected to exercise more skepticism and better judgment than we have come to expect from the typical campus administrator or professor.

Before accepting the Babson presidency, Healey had a vibrant career in the real world. Her departure from positions of prominence and responsibility into the academic mosh pit is a misfortune sadly demonstrated by what she’s chosen to do there — wrongly impugn the reputations and jeopardize the careers of two young men she happens to disagree with.

Harvey Silverglate, a Boston criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer and writer, is the co-founder of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (www.thefire.org). He co-authored The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses.